Tag Archives: music revivals

Post navigation

I don’t have an extravagant, purposeful reason why I made this video. But I just really wanted to try this new Acapella app that has basically taken over my Facebook newsfeed.

This app is really cool. It allows people to record two or more video tracks of themselves singing different harmonic lines, and play them all simultaneously. It’s the modern way of recreating a virtual choir, or the likes of breathtaking Pitch Perfect or Rockapella tracks, right at your fingertips. There are great ones, some just make me want to get sick.

I’ve been (or I’ve started to be) on hibernation mode for the last couple of days having been off-work (which I’m honestly loving at the moment because I felt kinda frazzled by a lot of stuff in the last two months, although I’m really grateful). And so I decided to just download the app, and sing away.

I picked my absolute favourite, “Barbara Ann”, which was originally sung by The Beach Boys, in a barbershop quartet arrangement. This song (particularly its arrangement) is very special to me because I have performed this tune with a group back in high school after we met the Musical Island Boys (my all-time favourite barbershop group, and seriously the best); and sort of adopted their style and arrangement into our own.

So, disclaimer: it is not my song, and not my arrangement. The only thing that I own in this material would be perhaps, my voice and my face.

I enjoyed making this one, and even listening to it because I just love the vibes and how the harmonies blend. It probably won’t be as shipshape as you might expect, but who cares? I’m not getting paid for it (HAHA! Kidding.)

Just when I thought I got nothing else better to do, I suddenly found myself setting up a SoundCloud account. Yes, I finally got SoundCloud! Somebody told me that apparently, there’s an unwritten law that if you’re a muso, you gotta have it.

And because I’m in exploratory mode (and actually pretty bored) at the moment, I thought I’d sign up. But I have one important note about how I’ve approached it.

I call all my recordings “Bare & Unaccompanied”. They are all sung a cappella to capture the raw sound of my voice–messy and untouched. No high-tech, professional equipment is used to record the songs but my ever loyal and diligent MacBook.

This is all to help promote and encourage honesty in showcasing and developing raw, unsullied talent; that artistic greatness can be achieved even without the use of ‘digital enhancers’. I see myself as one of those artists who eschew such elements like autotune and caustic musical editing just to make flimsy, mediocre stuff sound like ‘actual’ music; not to mention the people who lip-sync, to which Lea Salonga says, “Unless they’re on their deathbed, I have no respect for that.”

So anyway, here’s the link to my SoundCloud. It could have some of your fav tunes. Have a listen to some of them: